Froot Loops cereal has landed at the center of a political battle over artificial ingredients linked to cancer.
There have been increasing calls for the colorful hoops to be stripped of synthetic dyes such as Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6, as they have already been banned in Canada and Europe.
Hundreds of thousands have signed a petition calling on Kellogg’s to ban unnecessary additives, and more recently, advocates in Texas are pushing to ban Kellogg’s cereal in Texas public schools.
But despite the mounting pressure, the cereal giant is unlikely to make changes, according to Marion Nestlé, a prominent nutritionist who was a professor at New York University for nearly 30 years.
She told CNN that studies have shown how people believe brightly colored foods taste better and “prefer” them to naturally colored options.
When cereal companies replaced synthetic dyes with natural alternatives, Nestlé says “people don’t buy them (and) don’t want them as much.”
“From the cereal company’s point of view, this is a marketing imperative,” he adds.
Nestlé also points out the cultural differences between the United States and the rest of the world. ‘Americans seem to prefer neon colored tints more than Europeans.
‘Europeans buy cereals with natural colorings. But we don’t. Therefore, it is a problem for cereal companies.”
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Pointing to an example of a drop in sales after the elimination of food additives, Ms. Nestlé looks at General Mills’ brightly colored Trix.
She says: ‘In 2017, General Mills said they would remove color dyes from Trix.
‘Guess what? Sales fell. General Mills put the dyes back in. You know, I thought I really liked the colors they were using in the middle.
‘But people didn’t buy them and sales fell by 5 per cent or something like that. That’s all it takes.
And he added: ‘They are not public health agencies. They are businesses with shareholders to please. That is the conclusion.”
Nestlé notes that food coloring is only used for “cosmetic reasons” and “has no real function in the cereal other than to make it attractive.”
Kellogg’s promised to remove artificial colors and ingredients from all of its cereals nearly a decade ago by 2018, but it has yet to deliver on that promise.
Nestle bluntly says this is because “if they take them out, people won’t buy them.”
Former USDA food chief Dr Darin Detwiler previously told DailyMail.com that Kellogg’s Froot Loops are the worst breakfast cereal in the US due to the amount of chemicals the rings contain. colors.
Red 40, a dye that gives rings their neon red color, has been called the most concerning additive used in the food industry.
Along with Froot Loops, other recognizable foods that currently contain Red 40 include Fruity Pebbles, Trix, Nacho Cheese Doritos, Skittles, M&Ms, and Gatorade.
Is banned in several European countries due to its link with hyperactivity and cancerand they are not present in most products internationally, such as those from Australia and Canada.
Dr. Detwiler joined activists, including actress Eva Mendes, this fall, in an attempt to encourage Kellogg’s “will consider reformulating its products to reduce the use of artificial additives, colors and high levels of sugar.”
Marion Nestlé, a prominent nutritionist who was a professor at New York University for nearly 30 years, says it will be very difficult to force a change among cereal makers.
Along with red 40, the American variety of Fruit Loops contains yellow 5, blue 1, yellow 6, and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), which have been linked to health problems in children.
Canadian Froot Loops replaced these dyes with concentrated juices from cranberries, carrots and watermelon.
While studies show that dyes can cause health problems, Nestlé maintains that there are gaps in the research.
She reveals: ‘The problem for scientists is that research is extremely difficult to do.
‘You can’t take two populations of children and lock them up and feed them one set of food dyes and one set without food dyes and keep them there for several years and see if that affects their behavior.
‘It is not allowed to do studies like that. So they do animal studies. And animal studies are done at much higher doses than what is currently available in the food supply. And those studies show harm. So how do you interpret that?
In Europe, Nestlé says food companies “use what is called a precautionary principle, which ensures that these products are safe before they are used.”
In the United States, “because the Food and Drug Administration is underfunded and doesn’t have the staff or resources to do these kinds of things, they’re forced to take an approach generally recognized as safe, which, you know, ‘People have complained for decades that it doesn’t work.’